Website review request

Hello all,

Recently I've built a site that is a decorations online store, and I wanted you to tell me what you think about it;
This is not my site, but I wanted you to review this and tell me what you think about this design so I will be able to compare and change my own design according to your review.

First and foremost, you should try to optimize your code, the validator throws out 52 Errors. And the markup alone makes up for about 1924 lines of code, normally it shouldn't excede 200 lines, with few exceptions.

You incorrectly use tables for layout, which is just going to make it harder to maintain the site, so that's already where i suggest that you redesign it from scratch.

You however also appear to be using inline styles, which is about as insane as it can get, with a source that big. It would require extensive research for most designers, if they where to change something in the layout, it would most likely just be easier for them, to redesign the whole thing and be done with it.

You are also mixing deprecated presentational elements and attributes with css equivalents, or their better css alternatives. And you forgot to define a unit of measurement on height and width attributes, this means that most browsers will just guess that you mean pixels.

Finally, one last fetal blow on your coding. You forgot to include a valid doctype, which means that browsers renders your page in quirks mode, aka backwards compatibility mode.

The doctype must be located at exactly the first line in your page, before the html element. Because a bug in IE curses it to revert to quirks mode, if you place it further down, or if you place a html comment before (very bad idea).

The Design
If you must use images for your navigation links, then do at least compress them properly. The resolution of your images is damaged, presumably by setting the jpeg compression to high doing saving of your images.

Consider using css sprites to optimize your pages load time, by combining multiple images into single images, hence lowering the http requests required to load the page. You may also want to consider using pngs instead of jpgs, since they often provide smaller file-sizes. You can use PNGGauntlet to compress them even more, then what your graphics editor likely is capable of.

As far aesthetics go, the page also has too much going on in my opinion. There are a lot of products showing, and there is quite a bit of extra white space. Things could be reorganized to make use of this space if css is used as mentioned above.

Most of the other pages on that site use the same size block for every product on the same page, like http://www.99centplusonline.com/school.htm even though there are a lot of products to look through because your eyes don't have to jump around as much. Even though all 3 blocks on each row are the same height technically, the white space makes it seem as though they aren't the same size. I hope that actually makes sense.